I pay attention in lectures and meeting never take notes and that forces me to take everything in and engage fully. Reading and learning is more difficult because it involved in two activities .
That's the exact myth that actual research has shown is mostly false.
> This doesn't mean someone is exclusively visual but there certainly are preferences.
There are certainly preferences (in some part, this is a product of people buying into the myth), but the research keeps showing that catering to those preferences doesn't actually improve learning, and actually makes it worse compared to balanced approaches which address multiple modes rather than focussing on a learners perceived "preferred" mode.
Based on teaching a lot of people to dance and watching a lot of other teaching, the most effective thing I have found is to put someone in a practice dance hold (both people's arms on the other's shoulders, mostly straight) and sway back and forth until they start to feel body connection. Then start to change the magnitude of the sway, make a few simple steps with no warning, just keeping them rooted in the kinesthetic sense of connection. And when that connection is strong enough, bring them into close hold and just start into a waltz. I will have to massively overcompensate on turns initially because they don't know how to do them, but after a few turns around the room, they're ready for that correction. Left turns don't happen that first time out. Then take them contradancing, where they will be guided through interactions among lots of dancers and given a feel for flow. Add something like Renaissance or Scottish low country and you get step work. Only at this point is it useful to start observing other dancers or being told things.
You could always tell the self-taught ones. Their mental image of what their dance looked like did not match what others saw. That's because what you think you see is not what the actual movement is.
I know it's hard to believe, but it's true. A lot of dance movement is awkward and contorted, but it looks natural and fluid.
In any case, this thread is not fun anymore. Either I am totally weird or there is some communication going wrong.
No. Most people learn dancing by watching and repeating, with some explanation along with it.
> At least in ballroom dancing. How do they explain the steps?
In large part by demonstration (there's description that goes along, but the demonstration is primary.) Source: I've nearly completed a long course of instruction for ballroom dance teachers, from a well-regarded teacher-of-teachers, and have taken lots of ballroom dance classes, some from internationally-recognized teachers.
> "left, left, right, 1,2,3,4 turn" or similar.
That's more how they cue students going through a pattern that's been demonstrated than how they explain a pattern. You can explain a pattern in words without demonstration (manuals do this, for instance), but that's usually done as reference material that accompanied traditional teaching-by-demonstration (or, for auto-didacts, videos in place of in-person demonstration), and it sucks on its own; you need a lot of contextual knowledge to get value out of it.
The myth here is that you might think you're different than others in this regard. Pretty much every human can easily space out during a lecture. Pretty much every human can learn something better if they do it themselves or can understand a graph better than a list of numbers. Everyone is a visual learner, everyone learns by doing. A lesson should incorporate all of these aspects.